


Don't you know there's (not) a war going on?

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24669034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Small, rough snapshot of Karkat finding an old friend.
Relationships: Gamzee Makara & Karkat Vantas
Kudos: 22
Collections: Anonymous





	Don't you know there's (not) a war going on?

**Author's Note:**

> Posted once to twitter & bringing it here with some very minor revisions. Ty for reading, stuff like this is all I have time to write lately.

"I couldn't help you," he confesses the same way he'd gargle stomach acid. "And I fucking hated you for that."

Made him feel helpless. Stupid, gullible. Worthless and impotent as he ever thought he'd been. Bashing his stubby fists on the wall of God or narration or text or whatever may it be, and instead of heroically bloody he walked away limp and tired and numb. He was fucking ineffectual, and the endstate of Karkat Vantas was learning to be happy with being ineffectual, with having (almost) everything he loved ripped away from him.

It's not a hard thing to do. Not even close to hard. Alternia was hard. Alternia was training him to be smart, evasive, but brazen. Crazy, because there's no other way to live but crazy with an illegal body in a bio-power war machine, a freak blip in a ravenous protein mill. He was going to rip and tear through life until it caught up to him. He was going to die on the front lines, be dead and red with veins opened by anything but a culling fork, any other way than that. Now no one even chases. No one cares, and he learns how to deal with it. Have a few drinks with dinner. Keep your house neat. Take what you can get. Fuck everything else.

Gamzee's eyes are watering and purple and they aren't what they should be. Gamzee isn't beautiful. Has never been, never was, and never will be beautiful. Never beautiful, gentle, graceful, androgynous, composed and enticing and soothing, like a haze of smoke or a low hum or the dull roar of pleasure in slow, patient fucking like what he's imagining doing right now in whatever shitty studio they have for an apartment with plastic venetian blinds, fairy lights on the walls and plants on the windowsill and a tie-dye ceramic pipe on the nightstand next to a pill organizer and two half-drunk glasses of water, and moldy strawberries in the fridge, and one yellowed bulb that can only get the room so that everything looks like it does in the blurring edge of a sodium streetlamp, not gold like something beautiful and bright but like the yolk inside of an egg, not an egg that hatches into something beautiful like the world won't, like there's no sun, like the only light there will ever be is in those sick yellow lights painting the insides of rooms the color of something mortal and dying. Dying. He's 22 and he feels like he's dying, he's bleeding out here in some stranger's house and there's not even a war going on outside.

"Why did you fucking leave," he asks. "I wanted you, asshole. I would have done so much shit for you, you know that? I would have torn paradox space open if you'd wanted. I'd have let all this shit burn if you'd just asked." He chews the scabs on his lips. "You think you had it so bad, or something? If you wanted saving, you should have let me. I don't care what it would have taken. Anything you'd needed, I would have done it."

Their throat flutters, in a moment of silence.

"Brother mine," they explain, their voice small and raw. "That's why I didn't ask."


End file.
